brent Budgie deserves the love and
The best Linux desktop is the one that best fits a user's needs and preferences. For a lot of folks - especially new users - that's indeed Budgie. When I discovered Solus after years of distro hopping, I chose to download and install Budgie as well. Something about the word, "Flagship," I guess.
I was quite happy with Budgie for a couple years, but eventually I started to feel trapped by the limit of just 8 workspaces, because I regularly used more applications than that, and liked to keep them available without needing to search for them in a system menu. And since I use most of those applications at full-screen, I much prefer not to pile unrelated applications on top of one another in a single workspace.
When I realized that there was no such limitation with Plasma - a DE I had used with SuSE long before - I gave it a shot. Put simply, I enjoy using it so much that I don't miss Budgie at all. All but one of my computers here has run on Plasma for years - even the tiny ACER TravelMate laptop I bought for motorcycle touring.
I had wondered whether it would run such a sophisticated DE, with its Celeron processor and very limited resources, but it has no problem at all doing that. It's not as fast as our i7 Latitudes, of course, but I haven't found anything it can't do.
I sometimes wonder if Budgie had alllowed me to use enough workspaces to handle my preferred workflow, if I would still be using it today. Since I've installed and used VMs of all the Solus DEs, I'm guessing probaby not.
Please don't take my experience to mean that I have anything against Budgie, or the folks who prefer it. As I said, if it fits your needs and makes you happy, it's the perfect DE for you. Certainly the best DE of 2024.
